Top 100 Susanne Quotes
#1. Susanne Bier's work I've always really enjoyed. She's just such a great filmmaker; she's very cool and very sexy - that always helps, too.
Pierce Brosnan
#2. Three directors whose work directly influences mine are Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky and Susanne Bier (her Danish films). You'll notice that they all don't make feel good movies, same as me, and their films are always visually simple but beautiful (and I hope mine are!).
Chika Anadu
#3. When he ran into her at Susanne's, she was friendly but cool and distant. When they met in her bedroom, she was wildly passionate.
Stieg Larsson
#4. I give everything to my work, and I like complex roles, characters that aren't obvious. I've been very lucky so far, and I'm dreaming of working with directors like Jane Campion, Susanne Bier and the Dardennes. But the gods will decide.
Eva Green
#5. Susanne Alleyn's Game of Patience is a well-crafted historical mystery, authentic in every detail. Wonderfully entertaining.
Sandra Gulland
#6. A lot of people who live in Denmark will understand Danish but not necessarily speak it.
Susanne Bier
#7. When I watch a movie myself, I want to forget that I'm watching a movie, and I want to be inside the movie. That's the kind of experience I want my audience to have.
Susanne Bier
#8. I think that being Jewish has generated an extremely strong sense of the importance of family. If I look at my Scandinavian colleagues, they don't have that urgency about family. All my movies are about that.
Susanne Bier
#9. I guess I strongly feel that we cannot pretend that the Third World is not part of our world. We cannot say 'OK, there's that problem over there, let's just close our eyes' - we cannot do that.
Susanne Bier
#10. The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.
Susanne Bier
#12. Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#13. Women, nowhere in the world, have the kind of important position in society in the amount that they ought to have.
Susanne Bier
#14. Having done a Dogme film taught me the beauty of simplicity and austerity.
Susanne Bier
#15. For years, whenever I'd been travelling and came back to Copenhagen, I'd think: 'People are so stylish.' And it's not any one class. It's everyday life.
Susanne Bier
#16. The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#18. I think the lack of automatically feeling, 'Yes, the future is going to be like the present' - that is very much a Jewish thing.
Susanne Bier
#19. I believe with an extreme story the closer you look the more horrifying it gets.
Susanne Wuest
#21. No disrespect' is a world away from respect--and admiration.
Susanne Dunlap
#22. Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#23. A mind that is very selective to forms ... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#24. I am very close to my family, and there's something life-affirming about that. Even if you feel completely different from them and have totally different views on politics and ethics, you're still family and have that immediate acceptance.
Susanne Bier
#25. Life is easier than you'd think;all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable. Kathleen Norris
Susanne Matthews
#26. The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#27. In reality most people aren't as perfect as they want to seem.
Susanne Bier
#29. Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#30. In a way, our family is our modern identity.
Susanne Bier
#31. I will follow the upward road today; I will keep my face to the light. I will think high thoughts as I go my way; I will do what I know is right. I will look for the flowers by the side of the road; I will laugh and love and be strong. I will try to lighten another's load this day as I fare along.
Mary Susanne Edgar
#33. Homesick? For a village in the middle of nowhere? Where there's no work and everyone
Susanne O'Leary
#34. It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#35. I don't feel that I'm strictly Danish; I don't feel that my sense of humor is strictly Danish or my human sensibility is strictly Danish.
Susanne Bier
#36. A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#37. The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#39. Parents can shape a child, but a great teacher can, too.
Susanne Bier
#40. The image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art
plastic, musical, poetic, balletic
serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#41. My favorite hobby is matchmaking. It's a lot easier to do it in movies then in real life because in real life, people don't do what I tell them to do.
Susanne Bier
#43. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#46. I think most of my films all have a certain tone or intensity in them. They are tense, and you kind of anticipate some kind of catastrophe, but you're not quite sure.
Susanne Bier
#47. The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#48. If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
Susanne Langer
#49. Deacons are God's gift to bishops, not the other way around. They are there to remind him/her of their foundational calling. They become the instrument through which God saves a bishop's soul.12
Susanne Watson Epting
#50. In a way, the whole notion of a blueprint of a building is not that different from a script for a movie. A sequence of spaces, which is what you do as an architect, is really the same as a sequence of scenes.
Susanne Bier
#51. You win an Oscar, and the movie that comes after that is always going to be compared.
Susanne Bier
#52. Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#53. Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#54. The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#55. I don't do a lot of rehearsal. I don't like rehearsals. I rehearse the day or morning. I spend one hour and a half with all the actors, and we go over the scenes, and we change it and change the dialogue, and we do a lot of things to it, but prior to shooting, I don't really rehearse.
Susanne Bier
#56. I'm a huge fan of Richard Curtis - there's real grief, real compassion in his films as well as cheekiness; it's a wonderful cocktail.
Susanne Bier
#57. All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#58. A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.
Susanne Langer
#60. It is said that he bagan to write in French because he was fascinated by two words from the French that did not have an equivalent in his native German: 'verger,' orchard and 'paume,' palm of the hand.
Susanne Petermann
#61. Magic, then, is not a method, but a language; it is part and parcel of that greater phenomenon, ritual, which is the language of religion. Ritual is a symbolic transformation of experiences that no other medium can adequately express.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#62. At some stage in most people's lives, things turn upside down, and nothing is as you expected it to be.
Susanne Bier
#63. In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#64. I did learn a lot from 'Things We Lost in the Fire,' but I've learned different things from different films.
Susanne Bier
#66. I had to find a way to speak without ever saying the 'you' plural.
Susanne Wuest
#69. I think it is kind of depressing how few female filmmakers there are. I think it is in general depressing how few women there are in ... important positions in society
Susanne Bier
#70. The faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation ... But the facts which are accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#71. I believe in rules. I believe in artistic limitations, and I always have. I've always thought that setting out a set of rules before you start, and then being completely consistent with them, is the only way to make a really good film.
Susanne Bier
#72. Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#73. I generally edit quite heavily. In general, there aren't many scenes that are sitting where they sat in the script in the final form.
Susanne Bier
#74. I have this almost obsessive desire to whomever is close to me: I want to have a very intense, close, intimate relationship with them.
Susanne Bier
#75. The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#76. There are good and bad movies, and long ones, and pretentious ones, and fun ones, and it's kind of healthy not just being able to switch off after ten minutes, but have patience.
Susanne Bier
#77. For me, grief is a static thing, and my movies have an extremely dynamic sort of movement.
Susanne Bier
#78. I've got this fear of becoming comfortable.
Susanne Bier
#79. I think the good thing about Dogme is that it forces you into an extreme sense of reality because there's no artificial light and no set design and all of those icings on the cake that you usually have on a movie.
Susanne Bier
#80. I don't feel I have an issue with listening or understanding English in any sort of way.
Susanne Bier
#81. There are certain things you cannot accept. There are certain things that human beings cannot tolerate.
Susanne Bier
#82. People don't necessarily do evil deeds because they want to; people happen to do something with horrible consequences even if they meant to be kind.
Susanne Bier
#83. Oftentimes, reality is much worse than what you can put in a movie.
Susanne Bier
#84. Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent, is the mark of mentality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#85. The main thing as a director, you always want to have a bit of a worry about the material you're going to get yourself into. You want to be a bit scared of it so that you have that excitement of having to climb the mountain.
Susanne Bier
#86. The wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#87. We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#88. Dogme is like leading a religious life, in that you are freeing yourself from making certain choices. It makes life easier.
Susanne Bier
#89. The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#90. As a filmmaker, I always try not to concern myself with the outcome of things. I make the movie, and I do that as honestly and good as I can. I don't want to pollute my thoughts with what is going to happen with it afterwards, because I have to work inside-out.
Susanne Bier
#91. As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#92. I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.
Susanne Bier
#93. Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune
Susanne Katherina Langer
#94. The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#95. I've always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it's kind of disgraceful that there aren't more female directors.
Susanne Bier
#96. Value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#97. Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#98. I do believe that everything can look beautiful if you look at it from outside. The closer you zoom in, most of us exhibit behaviour that is strange to someone from outside.
Susanne Wuest
#99. I quite like some of the movies that have many characters in them.
Susanne Bier
#100. John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths.
Susanne Bier
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